One of my favorite games in recent memory is Fire Emblem Awakening for the Nintendo 3DS. Awakening is the thirteenth game in the strategy/RPG series. The Fire Emblem series has always been notable for it's permanent character death and it's deep tactical gameplay. The latter half of the series has been known for “support conversations” which gives the player an incentive to use different characters so they can see all of the different conversations in the game.

Awakening takes the support conversations even further. Just to read all of the support conversations would take dozens of hours, and that isn't including the time required to unlock them. You can spend so much time just reading these conversations alone. The conversations help flesh out otherwise generic characters and make them interesting.

The gameplay itself is as fun as previous entries. You level up characters and have them improve the skills their assigned class. Awakening adds the ability to change your character's class at will. The game's mechanics are as deep as ever.

The games mechanical complexity and sheer amount of narrative content make it one of my favorite games of 2013.